Symbiont Read online

  Even knowing what they were hadn’t been strictly necessary, had it? Sherman was a tapeworm too, and I had always liked him best, out of all the people at SymboGen. From the moment I’d met him, I’d liked him. If I’d had even the slightest clue that he was a product of Dr. Cale’s lab, that would have given me the information I needed. When I met a tapeworm, when I met somebody like me, I liked them. I couldn’t help myself. Even if I’d wind up disliking them later, I started from a place of “you are family.”

  So yes, I’d figured it out, and then I’d locked it away, because I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself. Admitting it would make it real. Only I guess pictures could do the same thing, because I didn’t even try to deny that the image on the screen was me.

  For the first time in my life, I was looking at who—at what—I really was.

  I was never Sally Mitchell after all.

  “The protein markers couldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier in a detectable form,” said Nathan. His voice was soft, like he was afraid anything louder would startle me. He wasn’t wrong. “It’s why we couldn’t detect…” He stopped, obviously unsure how to finish the sentence.

  There was no kind way to do it. “Honey, you’re not human” isn’t a conversation either of us was equipped to have. “Mom was right,” I whispered. She’d called me a stranger, and it had hurt, but it hadn’t hurt as much as it should have, had it? No, because I’d already figured out the same thing she had: that I wasn’t Sally. Her daughter died in the accident that put her in the hospital. I was a stranger living inside her baby’s skin. I was a stranger to the entire human race. “Oh, my God. Nathan. Do you see…?”

  “It doesn’t change anything,” he said, suddenly fierce. He let go of my hand as he stood, pushing the chair out of the way before he turned and wrapped his arms around me. He pulled me against him, holding me so tight that I was almost scared he would crush me. I put my arms around him in turn, doing my best to hug him just as hard. Voice still sharp, he said, “Do you understand me? It doesn’t change anything.”

  I raised my head and looked over his shoulder. Dr. Cale had parked her wheelchair in the doorway. She was sitting there watching us, an expression of profound regret on her face. I wouldn’t have believed that she was capable of looking so sad, but in that moment, she managed it, and in that moment, she looked like her son. Coloring and race didn’t matter, not when stacked up against that expression.

  So much of the way she had always interacted with me made sense now. So much of it still needed to be made sense of. “No,” I said. “It changes everything.” The broken doors that Dr. Cale had spoken of so often were open now; I could no longer pretend that they were just a children’s story, something I could safely forget about or ignore.

  I looked back to Nathan, raising my eyes to his face and searching for any sign of rejection or revulsion. I didn’t want to leave him, but I didn’t want to make him stay with me if he couldn’t deal with the reality of what I was. I wasn’t sure I could deal with the reality of what I was—the calm I was feeling was probably shock, and would pass, replaced by hysteria. Better to make my choices now, when I could trust myself, than to let it wait until I was no longer thinking clearly.

  How was I thinking at all? A tapeworm, no matter how cunningly engineered, didn’t have the size or complexity to think human-sized thoughts—but I managed it somehow. I had to be… the tapeworm part of me had to be driving Sally Mitchell’s brain, using it as storage somehow, like a person uses a computer. The thought made my stomach clench, and so I focused back on Nathan, who was safe; Nathan, who had never known Sally, but had fallen in love with Sal, with me, with the girl who had helped her injured sister into his office. He’d never batted an eye at any of my idiosyncrasies. Sally’s family had learned to love me when I replaced their daughter. Nathan had never needed to forget a person I could never be. That had always been so valuable to me. I was starting to understand a little bit more about why.

  He met my eyes unflinchingly, and all I saw there was concern, and hope, and yes, love. He looked the same as he always had: black hair, brown eyes behind wire-framed glasses, golden-tan skin, and a serious expression that could spring into a smile at any moment. I didn’t see any fear or dismissal, or even dismay, in that face. I blinked.

  “You knew,” I said, bewildered. “How did you know?”

  “I told him.” Dr. Cale sounded tired. I pulled away from Nathan and turned to face his mother, who was pale where he was dark, from her sun-deprived skin to the watery blue of her eyes and the ashy blonde of her hair. Her shoulders sagged as she looked at me, and she said, “Back in my lab, when you were asleep on Adam’s cot. I thought he should… I’m sorry, Sal, but I thought my son should know that his girlfriend wasn’t entirely human. You clearly weren’t ready to have the same conversation. Perhaps it was wrong of me.”

  “I think maybe it wasn’t,” I said slowly. “I wasn’t ready to know this yet. I wasn’t letting myself know this yet.” I looked down at my hands. “But I was going to figure it out.” I had already figured it out, and then locked the knowledge away from myself, as if that sort of thing had ever done any good. Once the signs had been placed in front of me, they had been too easy to follow. I would have followed them again, and maybe then, I wouldn’t have been able to make myself forget. “I needed Nathan to know before I did. I needed him to have time to come to terms with it. Because if he’d left me then…”

  If Nathan had been having his own freak-out at the same time I was having mine, I don’t know how I would have gotten through finding out the truth about myself. Having him pull away from me then—even temporarily—would have devastated me. Here and now, in this lab, with Tansy missing and Sherman alive but suddenly my enemy, losing my humanity was a huge step toward the abyss. Nathan had been able to place himself between me and that long, final fall, and he’d only been able to do it because he’d already known what I was.

  Dr. Cale nodded. “I’m glad you see it that way. That’s what I was hoping for.” She paused, watching me carefully before she continued: “I know you’re in shock right now, and I know we’ve all had a difficult day, but do you think I could have that thumb drive?” She grimaced. “I hate to ask you. I hate to even be here right now. You deserve this moment. But I need that data.”

  My eyes widened. “I forgot.” I had been refusing to give her the thumb drive full of information stolen from the SymboGen computers until she gave me the answers I thought I wanted. But then I’d been distracted by the need for blood tests and MRIs and then… “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” Now the glimmer of a smile touched her lips. “You had other things on your mind.”

  The words sounded faintly unreal, like she was quoting them from a book or movie, something that showed how an ethical mad scientist would behave. I pulled away from Nathan entirely, bending to rummage through my discarded clothing until I found the thumb drive in the front pocket of my jeans. I walked over and held it out to Dr. Cale, who took it without commenting on the fact that I was still wearing nothing but an unbuttoned lab coat. Between Tansy, Adam, and… and Sherman, she must have gotten used to people whose sense of modesty was somewhat less developed than the norm.

  “Thank you, Sal,” said Dr. Cale, taking the little plastic rectangle gently from my fingers. “You have no idea how much we need this data.”

  “What is it, exactly?” I asked. “Tansy said it would explain how some of the sleepwalkers were integrating more quickly with their hosts…”

  “It’s easy to forget sometimes that Steven Banks is a genius,” said Dr. Cale, still looking at the thumb drive. There was honest regret in her voice. “He blackmailed me into working for him, but the only reason he could was because I knew I wouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting alone—he’d be there to help, and to carry it on when I couldn’t go any further. It’s easy to sit here and say, ‘I did it, it was all my fault; I am Frankenstein and this is my monster,’ but D. symbogenesis is Steven’s ba
by as much as it is mine. Maybe more, by this point, at least where the commercial models are concerned.”

  “Meaning what, Mother?” asked Nathan.

  “Meaning he continued the work after I left; he continued altering the genetics of the different strains and families of implant, looking for that perfect mixture of form and functionality. He didn’t toss up his hands and say, ‘Well, Shanti’s gone, better throw in the towel and stick with what we have.’ He innovated. He improved. And what we have here, on this little piece of hardware, is a collection of those innovations.” Dr. Cale raised her head, and I almost recoiled. I wasn’t human, but neither was the light burning in her eyes: bright and cold and unforgiving. “Now that we know what he’s done, we’ll know how to undo it. So thank you, Sal. Thank you both. You’re welcome to stay here for as long as you like. I recommend you consider making your residency permanent.” On this grim note, she placed the thumb drive carefully in her lap, turned herself around, and rolled out of the room. She didn’t look back once.

  Nathan put his hand on my shoulder, stepping up beside me. The warmth of his body was reassuring. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  I tried to answer him—I honestly did—but all that came out was a high, anxious squeal of laughter, like the sort of sound a rat might make if it was caught in a trap. Something wet was on my face. I raised my hand to touch my cheek, and found tears there, flowing freely from both eyes. My narrow window of calm had apparently passed.

  I tried again to answer him, and this time there was no sound at all. The drums were back in my ears, and they grew louder as, with a great rushing roar like water pouring over a cliff, the dark crashed down and took me away.

  One advantage to passing out repeatedly in the same place: you’re more likely to wake up somewhere familiar. I opened my eyes and found myself looking at the ceiling of Dr. Cale’s lab, lying on the same narrow cot that had served as my bed the last time I had fainted. Only one light was on, and it was behind me, casting the room into the sort of deep shadow that never happens naturally. I sat up, dimly aware that I wasn’t alone.

  “Hello? Who’s there?” I frowned into the darkness in front of me. “So you know, I’m having a really bad day, so I’d appreciate it if you could move straight to threatening me, or making weird noises, or turning out to be on the other side of some massive ideological divide that’s going to shape the future of the human race.”

  “I don’t think we have any massive ideological divides,” said Adam. He slipped out of the shadows to my left, frowning bemusedly. “Are we supposed to?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi, Adam.” The drums started up in my ears again as my heart began to hammer. Adam was one of Dr. Cale’s human-tapeworm hybrids; the first, to hear her explain the situation. He was the oldest of us in the world. Everything I was experiencing was something he had experienced before me… and also not, because he had never spent a moment thinking he was anything but what he was. When he’d opened his eyes for the first time, it had been onto a world filled with people who knew his origins, accepted them, and didn’t try to make him into something else.

  That must have been nice. I couldn’t even imagine how nice it must have been. Dr. Cale had created him intentionally, combining samples of her first-generation D. symbogenesis worm with a brain-dead boy whose parents had basically sold him to her in exchange for escaping his mounting medical bills. I didn’t know what his body’s name had been before Adam took possession. So far as I was aware, he didn’t know either. It had never really mattered. That boy was gone, and Dr. Cale had never known him. She’d raised Adam without any shadows that wore his face to follow him around and make him feel bad for existing.

  “Where’s Tansy?” He took another step toward me, the light revealing more of his features. He was skinny and pale, with the sort of face that was practically designed to blend into crowds, just conventionally attractive enough not to stand out, too essentially plain to snag in the memory. He had blue eyes and sandy brown hair, and even though we didn’t look a thing alike, something deep in my core was telling me that he was my brother: more my brother than Joyce had ever been my sister. Adam was family. And family had to stick together.

  That feeling had always been there, I realized, but it was getting stronger from the combination of proximity and understanding. I wasn’t in denial anymore. I could accept all the parts of what I was—and that included my brother.

  Adam was also frowning, confusion and dismay becoming more pronounced with every second that passed without my giving him an answer.

  “She went with you,” he said, his tone implying that I might have forgotten—like I might have been distracted, or hit my head when I fell down and hit the floor. “That’s what Mom said. She said that Tansy was going to get you out of SymboGen so that you and Nathan could both come home, and we could finally be a family the way that we were supposed to.”

  The pounding of the drums didn’t lessen, but it was joined by another, less pleasant sensation: my stomach, slowly converting itself into solid ice. If Adam was my brother, Tansy was my sister. Oh, God. Did my sister die to save me?

  No. Not possible. Tansy was too mean to die that way. “Tansy was… she was there, yes. She’s the reason I got out of SymboGen. I don’t think I could have escaped without her.” That wasn’t quite true. I knew that I wouldn’t have escaped without her. Tansy had been the motive force driving my escape from the building, and it was only her willingness to stay behind that had bought the time Nathan and I needed to get to the car. Without Tansy, I would have been a prisoner, or worse.

  And Tansy wasn’t here.

  Adam looked at me, frown deepening into something sharp. “That’s what Tansy does,” he said. “She doesn’t think much before she helps other people. Or hurts them, sometimes. She says it’s because of the parts in her brain that aren’t functioning optimally. I think she’s trying to get hurt badly enough that Mom will transplant her into a new host, but I don’t want that to happen. She wouldn’t be Tansy anymore if that happened. She’d be someone else.”

  I blinked. “Wait—that’s a thing that Dr. Cale can do? She could just scoop you out of the body you’re in and put you into a different one?”

  “Sort of,” said Adam. “She says it becomes a question of nature and nurture, because memories don’t carry over, just core personality and epigenetic data, and—wait. Are you trying to distract me? Where’s Tansy, Sal? Why didn’t she come back here with you?”

  I took a deep breath, which barely warmed the ball of ice sitting in my stomach, and said, “She stayed behind, Adam. There were a bunch of sleepwalkers—more than I’ve ever seen in one place—and they were going to hurt me, and Nathan. So Tansy stayed behind to fight them. She bought us the time that we needed to get away.” She’d gone down under a wall of bodies, all of them biting and clawing at her like the fact that she was only developmentally one step removed from the sleepwalkers didn’t matter—and maybe it didn’t. I didn’t feel any kinship to them, and never had, but with every minute that passed, I was feeling more as if she and Adam were, and had always been, family.

  I really should have seen it sooner. Neither he nor Tansy had ever upset me the way the sleepwalkers did, even though they should have. Especially Tansy, whose methods of communication were brusque at best, and dangerous at worst. I’d already known on some level that we were the same, and it was easier to be forgiving of family. That’s what family was for. I didn’t know how I knew that. I probably shouldn’t have, given my experiences with Sally’s family. But I knew.

  “Why didn’t you stay and help her?” asked Adam blankly.

  “I couldn’t. I don’t know how to fight, and the information I had… I had the information Dr. Cale needed. If I’d stayed to help Tansy, the information would have been lost, and then Dr. Cale wouldn’t have been able to continue her work.” The knot of ice in my stomach seemed to be loosening a little.

  “Oh.” Adam mulled this over for a few moments, looking even you
nger while he did. Maybe that was one of the functions of the tapeworm-to-human interface. I had perceived a certain childishness about Tansy, and my parents—Sally’s parents—used to comment on the fact that I looked young and lost when I was thinking. It was one more thing I didn’t share with their original daughter, who had never been much for stopping to think about things, and certainly wouldn’t have looked lost while she was doing it.

  It hurt a little to realize that I didn’t entirely think of them as my parents anymore; not the same way I had only a few weeks before. They would always be a part of who I was, but I no longer felt the need to try to make them love me, and that felt like the sort of bond that should have taken longer to break. Maybe it was different when the bond had never fully formed. They’d always be important to me, but they hadn’t made me.

  “Well, I guess she’ll tell me what happened when she gets back,” said Adam finally, and walked over to sit down on the edge of the cot, looking at me with wide, guileless eyes. “Are you feeling better? You sure do faint a lot.”

  “I get startled a lot,” I said, smiling despite myself. “What about you? You’ve never fainted? Not even once?”

  “A few times, when I first woke up,” he said. “Mom says it’s because some of the blood vessels feeding into my brain were compromised during my surgery, and they needed time to recover.”

  I wondered absently if I might be dealing with something similar. It didn’t seem likely. Any weak blood vessels would have been found and fixed by SymboGen years ago. I was just dealing with plain, old-fashioned shock, and that was actually a little reassuring: at least something about me was plain and old-fashioned.